[alexjon]

A little background: early this business day (before 7am), 3 power poles were stripped on the east end of the steel bridge, taking out power in a way that inhibited switching of the Yellow Line MAX.

What happened?

Nothin'!

We were stopped early (I rode the cross-town yellow line from beaverton), and me and other passengers had to transfer to a blue line. Apparently, the thru-transit could make it over the bridge, but that little segment of switching was plotzed preventing the MAX from switching over to the interstate line.

What caused it?

A large truck slammed into the power lines, taking them out. Plainly put, it was the fault of the driver, and not trimet or anyone else of that sort.

Later in the afternoon, on my way back home, there was a bit of a kerfuffle: drivers aren't very bright. With the lights out, a lot of drivers took to ignoring traffic direction and careened into the path of the MAX, stopping before getting smushed.

I just sat there, reading. Yawn, drivers. Yawn.

Anyway, long story short: Trimet handled this fabulously, proving again that the MAX works whether you like it or not.

And now you know!

[Dougall5505]

i never even heard about this. was it all over the news or something?

[alexjon]

^ Yup! The news was crawling all over it, and at first they were screeching and blaming trimet until they realized how smoothly things were going.

[pyropius]

That made the news? Here in Chicago, CTA trains not jumping their tracks is newsworthy!

[alexjon]

Haha, well, the MAX has a great, ahem, track record.

[WestCoast]

i take the yellow into work most days, and the driver seemed to know what was going on at 8am, and made announcements.

i get off before it crosses the bridge anyway, but it didn't seem like that big a deal for most riders

[der Reisender]

they had fixed it in time for the afternoon commute going back over, and i didn't notice any ill effects of the outage in the morning on the blue

[65MAX]

<cough> tunnel <cough>

[sirsimon]

I went through that area around 12:30PM and noticed all the traffic lights were out. Trimet had quite a few transit cops watching (but not necessarily directing) traffic.